Electronic delivery of instructional material has been done in many ways. For example, a U.S. Pat. No. 3,566,482 to C. A. Morchand and another U.S. Pat. No. 3,606,688 to J. Zawels et al. shown television broadcast techniques for distributing instructional material to students at widely dispersed television-type receivers. The essentially unilateral communication involved in such systems requires that course delivery proceed in a predetermined sequence with no opportunity for a student to alter the delivery pace or to branch to arbitrarily selected points in a course. p In a paper by R. Kaplow et al. entitled "TICS: A System for the Authoring and Delivery of Interactive Instructional Programs," which appeared on pages 384-388 of Proceedings, Seventh Annual Princeton Conference on Information Sciences and Systems, which conference took place March 22-23, 1973, a computer-assisted instruction delivery system gave a student some leeway in branching out and setting an appropriate pace in proceeding through a course by having at the disposal of the student certain global commands. These commands were usable at any time and allowed, for example, the repetition of a current topic or the branching to certain course nodes specifically identified by the teacher in the course material in terms of a set of keywords which were unique to the branching points. It has been found, however, that most students who are new to the subject matter of a course, or to a computer-assisted instructional system, are relatively passive and rarely take advantage of the opportunity to utilize such global flexibility offered to them without substantial guidance.